Post Category → Musings

Terrifying Freedom

It can be comforting to have something keeping you down.

A shitty boss or a dead end job, the Gub’ment or the Man. Patriarchy or racism. All of these things conspire to block you from being happy, successful and fulfilled. And that’s comforting for a lot of people because it gives you something to blame. Something to rail against and to grumble about on the commute home each day.

I’m pretty sure my best thinking is behind me. I did it all during my four years of high school debate team. But during that time the one idea that we studied that continues to fascinate me the most is threat construction. Threat construction is a fairly formalized sociological and psychological tendency for us to construct external threats. Psychologically this manifests in our desire to constantly create a bogeyman that’s the root cause of the problems in our life. The effect becomes even more powerful when groups of people circle the wagons and rally together to blame some “other” for their misfortunes. People are constantly creating, or at least vastly exaggerating, external threats.

And we really enjoy this. Coworkers love to kibitz about the bosses. Crazy uncles love to prognosticate on the impending threat of sharia law. I do it too. When my startup was failing I used to love to bitch about the stupid VCs who wouldn’t invest in us. Once you start thinking about threat construction, you see it everywhere, including in your own thinking all the time. We are constantly manufacturing and exaggerating layers upon layers of external threats.

Because the alternative can be terrifying.

When you start to really examine these threats or forces one by one and deconstruct them, what you probably find is that 99% of what’s keeping you down is made up of two things. The first thing is the shear randomness of the universe. You’re not cursed, you don’t have consistently bad luck, it’s just that the universe, the distribution of positive events, gene allocation are all profoundly random. Nothing is conspiring against you there and they only thing you can do is act like a professional poker player. You make good bets with your time, energy, decisions and resources and you let the chips fall. The second thing is You. And that’s the terrifying part. It’s comforting to think that you’re doing all you can and some force, human or otherwise is just blocking your path. But we when you really examine those thoughts it turns out that you have the ultimate control over the vast majority of those things.

Those layers of external threats and forces act as comfort blanket, shielding us from the ultimate responsibility for our own lives. My Dad used to always have a saying about his martial arts teacher who would say that “if someone punches you, it’s your fault for not getting out of the way.” It sounds a bit crazy at first glance, but it’s pretty liberating. It’s a way of thinking that you have the capacity to affect every part of your life and nothing is really out of your control to influence or improve.

Now I’m not saying that shitty bosses or government intrusion or sexism or racism are not real things. I’m not saying they’re made up. Some threats are made up, but some of them are very real. But I do think that in most cases they simply tilt the already uncertain and difficult terrain of life further against you. The lion’s share of the blame for the status of your life is probably still on you.

Complaining to your friend about something that’s keeping you from your dreams gives you a short, quick hit of good chemicals in your brain. Deeply examine the issue and you realize that 1) ultimately the onus is on you to act and 2) acting probably involves taking some risk, and the randomness of the universe ensures you don’t know it the risk will pay off. That does not give you a spurt of good chemicals, but something more akin to a punch in the gut.

But it’s the truth. We all have a terrifying freedom.

Struggling

I’ve been struggling lately with what to do next in 2015. In 2014 I had mostly to choose from a limited selection of hard choices. We had to make the decision to shut down SolarList. I then had to find a way to get back some of the enormous amount of money I lost on the project. I spent a good chunk of the year turning my side project into a full time income and building an ecommerce/startup consulting practice. In 2015 I’m very slightly moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. My safety and (largely financial) security are in a decent place. My attention is shifting (back) to things that maximize my ability to do something that matters in the world. Systematizing the things that make money is increasingly freeing up more and more of my time, leaving me to figure out what exactly to do with it.

At the same time I’m in Chiang Mai. A digital nomad nexus filled with people doing unconventional things with their lives. Everyone you meet just slightly amplifies the feeling that literally everything you can do with your life is on the table or at least worth considering.

I found myself pretty scatter-brained. I’ve been generating ideas faster than I can evaluate them, but I have also been evaluating them — testing them out, throwing me out to smart people for a valued opinion. Thanks folks for bearing with me. As I tried evaluate ideas, some of them seemed to be not totally stupid. So the next question is, well I can’t do ALL of these, so I should start trying to compare them.

And this is where things just get weird. Every time I compared ideas, either in conversation or in my own head, I found the line of thinking started as a neat little two-column list of pros and cons, and rapidly devolved to a very existential discussion of what did I truly value in life.

Literally, I start off talking about two types of web apps and end up in a deep discussion of human fear of our own mortality. I’m talking about converting travel guides from PDF to HTML and end up debating, intensely, whether giving 1,000 people a moment of joy they will remember their whole life is ethically more worthwhile than materially improving 1,000 people’s standard of living in some useful but ultimately boring way. What the hell! How can I possibly make a simple decision when everything devolves to an insoluble philosophical question.

So I sat down today and I started writing, and talking to myself, and talking to my computer and listening to it back. Trying to dig deeply into the different distilled conflicts all these options kept circling back to. And all of the sudden I was like:

Oh.

There’s absolutely nothing unique here at all.

All of these conflicts distilled to some very fundamental dilemmas that probably every human faces on some level. You only have so many units of time and energy in your life and you constantly have to distribute how much you dedicate toward trying to fulfill each of these categories. All of these are hard too. They’re all a gamble. You can put all your time and energy into one and still not get the desired effect, on top of having neglected the others. Life is hard that way.

So what am I thinking about and what are these categories, you might ask. You might already think I’m full of crap and have closed this tab. But for those of you still with me, read on.

Making more money

Why would I want to make more money? I guess some people might find this question silly but I think it’s an important question to ask. I hate thinking about money. I get a visceral reaction in the pit of my stomach to thinking about budgets and accounting and taxes. In my personal life I only want to make money for the purpose of thinking less about money. And I think there is hopefully an achievable crossover point where I have enough money that I don’t really have to think about money at all.

But moreover it seems like it really does take money to do something interesting with one’s life. Money is influence. Money is optionality. Money can give you back 100% of your time and energy to focus on things other than paying the rent.

One of the biggest mistakes I made with SolarList was increasing my expenses too quickly without the ability to cover them. As a result we couldn’t take a long view on the business, we didn’t have time to experiment and basically it was a total crisis just to pay the rent. I never want to go through that again, so building up financial security has a lot of value for me.

So I’m looking at some options. One avenue is to take the lessons learned from SolarList: digging deep into the customer education and sales process of solar energy, building software and doing dozens of user interface experiments. To take that and do enterprise consulting with big companies. Another is to continue to build out my ecommerce and consulting business. And another is to build another product like Storemapper. With so much experience in building a micro-SaaS product I feel confident I could churn out another few simple products and catch a small winner pretty shortly. Two profitable micro-SaaS business would almost certainly throw off enough cash that I could basically spend 100% of my time not making any money for the foreseeable future, at least until/unless I needed to support a family.

All decent. I’m lucky to even have them as viable options.

But they also don’t feel very meaningful. At the end of it I’ll just have the money and have spent the time. Who really gives a shit about money. Right now I’m in Thailand where it costs about $1,000/month to live really really well. I’ve just spent the last year thinking, involuntarily, a lot about money and I fucking hate thinking about money.

Do meaningful things, make a dent, etc

This is the big one. Basically I just want to be in perfect health, full of energy, have all my finances taken care of and spend all of my time trying to solve important problems that will matter 200 years from now.

Elderly heiresses take note: If any wealthy aristocrats would like to sponsor me in that endeavor, I’m certainly open to arrangements.

When I quit my job I had a vision for my startup. There was this massive energy transition that needed (needs) to happen to save the freaking world. In my job I had learned that I was particularly good at buildings tools that accurately described big parts of this transition and could make them concrete and quantifiable. I learned that I could be at times particularly compelling at dispelling inaccurate beliefs about this energy transition, using that data and those models. So I wanted to scale up what I felt I could do on a person to person basis. Massively scalable, personalized education that would change the minds of millions of people and meaningfully accelerate an energy transformation that could save the world!

Fuck that’s meaningful, right!?

So why do I spend my days working on an ecommerce widget!?

Well, see above, it creates a degree of financial freedom for me. I work on it because it has high leverage of time, it can pay the bills and give me more time in return to work on big projects.

So, I should be working on big meaningful projects right?

Yes, I should.

But, honestly I’m hesitant and yea, a little bit afraid. I have only just barely scraped my way to avoiding personal bankruptcy. My first startup basically failed, had to have shitty conversations with investors — friends, mind you, who put their hard earned money behind me, and lost it. I invested three years of my 20s with very little meaning to show for it. I’m still psyching myself up to get back in the ring.

But this is crap and excuses. What big things am I thinking about:

1) I’m still not over the original vision behind SolarList. I think about giving it another go in solar. I think about trying the same angle — software superpowered personalized education — in different markets like LED lighting. I’m still aggressively poking around looking for an idea that really punches me in the gut and forces me to commit.

2) On some level I worry that I’ve missed the opportunity a little bit. That big companies and marketing budgets are ultimately going to solve #1 in the developed world because the major technologies have reached a threshold where they make sense for a very large number of consumers. I’m super curious about what’s going at the edge of the grid with distributed renewable technologies. In mobile much of the innovation happened at the edges, like mobile money, and percolated back through to the broader network. I think the next big phase of this energy transition may look like that, where innovations happen at the edge in unexpected ways. I would love to start exploring that and documenting that. And exploring it, at least at first, in a totally non-commercial way. Just learning and showing other people what’s going on. This intersects with something else that I think about the next phase of the energy transition is that business models become less important for moving things forward and something that looks more like “art” becomes radically more important. Things that serve no purpose other than to make the observer feel something. And that feeling starts to change the way they perceive the world and that seeps into their decision making so that they simply decide they want to participate in taking better care of the climate, whatever the return on investment may be.

3) Outside of few individual people, nothing has had a larger and more positive impact on my life than travel. I don’t remember where I read this, but someone suggested a thought experiment: What job would you be doing if you woke up every morning and thought to yourself, “Wow, I can’t fucking believe I get to do this for work!”? For me I think that would be running company where the product helped more people travel for their first time, helped more people afford to travel more often and helped people have spontaneous adventures that they treasured their whole lives. That would be awesome. Also, I’m a traveler so I can just scratch my own itch and build products I like. But as I dig deeper I’m discovering that, well, a lot people think the same way and it’s a super complicated, super crowded market with a ton of very smart people who know a lot more than me already working in it.

Take care of self and do fun things

In 2013 I took very bad care of myself. I raced my mind at full-throttle. I drank too much coffee and booze. Stressed myself out severely and got in pretty bad shape. Since early 2014 I reverse that to some extent, mainly emergency maintenance. But I haven’t really invested in rejuvenating myself.

The conundrum is always that maybe you’re just too burnt out to do the ambitious stuff you want to do. Maybe I’ll do better at all of these other things if I take a few months to focus on traveling, re-investing in my education, learn a language, do more rock climbing, yoga and skiing. Maybe I’ll come out of that with 10x the energy and everything else will be better for it.

But wow is it hard to turn off that ambition. I probably would need someone to force me to do this as I can’t imagine convincing myself to do anything more than the minimum. But Southeast Asia is a lovely place to just relax and have fun for a little while. It’s cheap, the weather is nice and the food is good.

Probably not going to happen.

Giving to family and loved ones

This is a short one because there’s not a lot of nuance to it. Pretty straightforward. I don’t give nearly enough of my time and energy to my family and loved ones. I’ve lived a lot of my life on the opposite end of that spectrum. Mostly because I saw too many of my friends and peers sacrifice too much of their lives and opportunities for rote familial obligations. I always thought people spent too much of their time and money flying home for every holiday and doing stuff just because it’s what you do. They missed out on too many opportunities and experiences for it. I love my family, but I always felt a little comfortable passing certain obligations that society and tradition place on the eldest son.

But the fact remains that my family, extended family and loved ones could do with more from me. There’s help for the older folks and mentorship for the younger ones that I could and should give. As I get older, and more importantly as they all do, this gnaws at me more and more. Gotta do better.

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So that’s what is on my mind. I’m going to, perhaps too rashly, post this unedited and then go for a digital detox for a few days. Maybe I’ll come back with a clearer head. Thanks for reading.

Compound Interest is a Scam

Compound Interest is a Scam

The miracle of compound interest is often taken as gospel. Your parents are constantly extolling its virtues. “Be sure to max out your 401k every month”, they’ll say. “Save 10% of your paycheck.” “It’s never too early to start planning for your retirement.”

Meanwhile the average savings account last year had a laughable 0.06% interest rate. What a joke. If asked you to lend me $100, and in a year I’d give you back your $100 plus a whopping 6 pennies you would justifiably laugh in my face. But we have been spoon fed since we were little that no matter how tiny the interest rate on offer, we still have to fork over the cash to our savings accounts or suffer the guilt trip.

Continue reading →

Play the Long Game

Ok screw it. You are going to think I’m a big nerd but I’m posting this anyway.

Early this year I left my apartment in Brooklyn. I put all my stuff in storage (for the third time in as many years) but this time using NYC startup Makespace. They deliver boxes to your house, pick them up, and you can request individual boxes be hand-delivered to you anywhere in NYC (or now shipped to anywhere).

I jetted off to Southeast Asia for a few months. I didn’t have a return ticket at the time but looking ahead, I thought I might cut my return very close to a friend’s wedding. So I packed one of my Makespace boxes with a pressed tuxedo, cufflinks, polished shoes… I called it my 007 Go Box because James Bond is always showing up in random places and he still has perfectly pressed, tailored and climate-appropriate threads in every situation.

3 months later, I fly back from Bali to NYC, book one night in a hotel, meet my girlfriend (who flies in that day via Poland) and using my phone, have my tux delivered to the hotel lobby. We’re in a Mini Cooper off for Vermont the next morning. How jetset is that?!

I liked the story, so I wrote it up and emailed it to Sam, the CEO of Makespace. He loves it and they want to write a blog post about it. We do a quick Skype interview and voila: How Tyler Tringas uses Makespace to Live Like James Bond

A month later

Tim Ferriss writes this post How to Never Check Luggage Again and he talks about “travel caching” which is an analog version of what I’m doing with Makespace. So I tweet at him and he tweets back and includes the story in his blog post.

Tim’s blog gets like eleventy-million unique visitors a month, and now in one of his blog posts, there is a link to another blog post, that links to me.

Screenshot 2014-08-11 11.21.44.png

So play the Long Game:

  1. Do awesome things
  2. Tell people about them
  3. They blog about you doing those things
  4. Tim Ferriss blogs about other people blogging about you
  5. ????
  6. Profit

Ok, my example is just fun but Justin Jackson has a great post about how this kind of thing is actually more like serious marketing called Play the long game

Evolution, mountains, careers and superjumps

This is a post about career and life decisions, but first, evolution.

Survival of the fittest gets all the credit in evolution. But if that was all there was to evolution, we would all be slowly converging towards a single super-fit species. Evolution is only so powerful thanks to another

equally important component: mutation. As a species slowly grinds away towards slightly better fitness, occasionally, a member of the species mutates, and radically changes. Most of the time the mutation is a failure, but sometimes the complete shot in the dark yields a much better adaptation that ultimately creates an entirely new species or comes back to dominate the original one.

A good metaphor for understanding this interplay is that of the fitness landscape. Imagine a mountain range, with peaks and valleys and each mountain is a random height. Traversing this landscape, height = awesomeness, so everybody on this landscape always wants to get as high as possible.

Now imagine you’re dropped at random somewhere on the fitness landscape. You have a fancy GPS watch that tells you your elevation, but a dense fog has set in, so you really can’t see the whole range, or even the whole peak/valley you are currently on. How do you get higher? Well, you’ll take a few tiny steps in one direction, check if your getting higher and either keep going or change directions and check again. This is survival of the fittest, small variations that double down on incremental improvement.

But what happens if you have randomly been dropped at the foot of the tiniest little hill in the whole mountain range. Your survival of the fittest strategy won’t serve you very well, yes, you’ll eventually make it to the top of the hill, but what then? This is a local maximum. You are improving alright, but you’re going up the wrong hill, taking you further away from the higher, more awesome, peaks in the range.

This is where the mutation comes into play. Mutating in the fitness landscape is the equivalent of a super jump superpower. When you mutate you launch yourself to some other random spot, check your elevation and start feeling around for ways to get a bit higher. You might end up lower than the top of your first little hill, but you might also land on a much bigger Mount Awesome, and your incrementalist strategy will get you right to the top.

The interplay of small improvements and a few big random jumps is what makes evolution so powerful. Short guess and check with the occasional superjump is also the best strategy for traversing the fitness landscape. The metaphor is pretty simplistic, but I think it’s a powerful mental tool for a lot of scenarios.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the fitness landscape in the context of career trajectory. I think most of us spend way too much time optimizing for a local maximum when we should be taking a few more random superjumps. We’re halfway up our little hill. We think about all the work it took to get up to this point. The stack of degrees signifying our right to be so far up this particular hill. The carefully constructed CV that shows us a clear path several more steps up the same hill.

By contrast the mutation, the superjump, the leap of faith seems crazy. Where will we end up after the jump? What guarantee do we have that the we’ll land on a higher mountain? What if we fail and land smack in the middle of a valley? No no, this hill is just much safer and more certain. Two more steps up.

But evolution tells us that this really is the best way to get as high as we can. So maybe we should take a few more leaps of faith in our careers, trying out a field where we have no expertise, no credentials, just confidence that when we get there we will work hard and get better and starting heading up the hill. I’m not saying all the time, but probably more often than we do now.

Another upside, superjumps are definitely NOT boring.

Related listening: Tim Ferriss on reasons to be a Jack of All Trades